When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily. Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it. My mother's core was rotten.

She barely looked up at me as I entered the room she'd been sitting in for the past 10 years.

"Hello, mother," I said.

"Bitch," she replied.

She started complaining about how her neighbour was stealing from her before she shat herself loudly. She fell asleep and I dragged her out on to the porch to clean her up. Her eyes were vacant when she woke up and I thought, "This is as far as we go." I felt her nose break as I pressed down, squeezing the life out of her 88-year-old body.

My mind turned to the back story, as it so often does when a writer is trying too hard to change the pace and create narrative tension. I thought of how my mother had once been a lingerie model, how everything my father and I had done had always disappointed her, how my father had died ...

After dropping these few heavy-handed clues for the reader, I pushed my mother's corpse into the basement and started washing off the shit. She would have wanted me to take care of her like that. My heart raced. What had I done? There was only one person who could help. Jake.

I'm not sure why I imagined my ex-husband, whom I hadn't seen for 10 years, could help, but it would be a great excuse to look at my own marital failures and my two dysfunctional grown-up children, Sarah and Emily. Jake and I had dated when I was a nude model in his art class - I hope you're picking up the parallels with my mother's life here or I'm rather wasting my time with all this heavily signposted therapy stuff - but I'd driven him away after my father died. Did I mention that my father had died? There was blood everywhere ...

Even though I didn't have Jake's number, I called him on his cellphone.

"I need you," I said. "Where are you?"

"Santa Barbara."

"That's a long way from Pennsylvania."

"I'm coming anyway."

There was time to kill before Jake arrived. I needed to find something shocking to do. I called my friend Natalie, whose husband had died a hideous death some years back. She wasn't there but her son, Hamish, was.

"Let's have completely detached, mechanical sex," I said.

"Suits me," he drooled.

I coldly replaced my clothes. Jake still wouldn't be here for hours. There was nothing for it but to relive my past. How my mother had just watched and done nothing when a young boy was killed; how she never left the house; how the neighbours hit me; how my father blew his brains out in front of her - you knew I'd get there in the end; how my mother used to tease me about my weight and made me anorexic and bulimic; how my father used to create replica wooden families in his flooded childhood home; how my mother hated my children; how I hated my mother but could never separate from her (yawn) . . .

Jake turned up before I could remember how I had been sold to a paedophile ring. "Your life is unremittingly grim," he said.

"I know," I replied. "I've never laughed or smiled. I think mental illness might run in families. But I would like to do a bit more nude modelling before the police come."

They arrived as I was disrobing. Their questions were precise and it was only a matter of time before I was arrested. I called Sarah and told her the truth. She was surprisingly unbothered. "She was an abusive old hag," she cawed. "You'll be out in no time."

My mind was made up. One more pointless screw with Hamish, steal his gun and then back to my mother's house for some peace and quiet to kill myself. A perfect end to a perfect day.